Open source is the lifeblood of modern software development, there’s no getting around it. It makes sense that development teams want to get a head-start when beginning a new project and don’t want to have to start from scratch every time. Because open source software is designed and “certified” with public use in mind, it is prevalent throughout the app dev community.

There is a lot of talk about DevOps these days. I guess you’ve noticed that too, if you have anything to do with tech and haven’t been living in the woods the last three years.
I spoke on a panel a few weeks ago at the MIT CIO Symposium called Running IT Like a Factory. One of my co-panelists talked a lot about cloud-native companies, and how Netflix does 3,000 releases per month and Amazon does 11,000 releases per year. He also referenced the robustness of AWS and how companies like this can create a ton of value very quickly.

The recent spate of IT glitches and ‘power outages’ at British Airways which caused the UK’s national carrier to cancel all its flights worldwide at the start of May bank holiday along with the WannaCry ransomware attack which ground the National Health Service to a halt have exposed again the importance of IT systems in today’s business. The complexity of these IT systems, the number of vulnerabilities that exist in critical software used by critical infrastructure sectors such as the NHS, airlines, telecom operators has made headlines once more.

Harvard Business Review has reported that digital leaders succeed in large part due to their ability to recognize and scale innovation across their business – seeing beyond transformation hurdles and IT complexity. They never lose sight of the end goal.
So, what does it take to be a digital leader? As a sponsor of the Software Risk & Innovation Summit last week in New York City, I was able to hear from some of the leading experts on the matter, including CISQ, JetBlue, COACH, Fannie Mae, BCG and others.

Our friend Paul Bentz at CISQ recently published an article detailing the imperative for CIOs to become digital leaders. Research from Gartner confirms that high-performing CIOs are leaders because of their participation in a digital ecosystem. To effectively drive transformational programs, CIOs must have a keen understanding of how digital drives both business and IT success.